The strongest impacts of an emergent technology are always unanticipated. You can’t know what people are going to do until they get their hands on it and start using it on a daily basis, using it to make a buck and using it for criminal purpose and all the different things that people do.

— William Gibson, interviewed in The Paris Review, Art of Fiction #211

Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Robert Fano was born in Turin in 1917. He is Jewish and came to the United States in 1939 because of Mussolini’s anti-Jewish legislation passed the previous year. [33][34] He is now 93 years old and has been a professor at MIT for over 60 years. I called him not knowing what to expect, but he is as sharp as a tack. [35] (I am reminded of Bertrand Russell’s response when he was asked by an interviewer about reports that he might be senile. He was in his mid-90s at the time. Russell’s response was, “If I’m senile, I guess I would be the last to know.”)

ROBERT FANO: I’m trying to think briefly how to put it. There were two ideas. One was Licklider’s vision of man-computer symbiosis. The other was John McCarthy’s vision of a computer utility analogous to an electric-power utility — that allowed individuals to access a computer at an affordable cost. Now, that started activities at MIT in developing a time-sharing system. Fernando J. Corbató, best known as Corby, led the implementation of CTSS, Compatible Time-sharing System. I was involved just on the periphery of all this. And when Licklider went to Washington in 1962 as head of the computer section at ARPA, he obviously wanted to fund a big project on the subject. He visited various universities, but it was MIT that had the CTSS available. I believed that computer science was going to be an important new discipline and such a project would provide a great opportunity to get started. Unfortunately, at that time there was no senior faculty interested and knowledgeable about computers. At a certain point, I decided, if nobody was ready to get the ball rolling, I was going to do it, although my experience with computers was close to nil.

It could be a 20th century version of Genesis. In the beginning there was Robert Fano, Fernando Corbató and J. C. R. Licklider. There were others, of course. Many others. John McCarthy and Edward Fredkin at a Cambridge consulting firm, BBN (Bolt Beranek & Newman) — Licklider was at MIT, then BBN, then at ARPA, and ultimately back at MIT — but MIT was the hub. A group of professors and engineering students wanted to change how computers were used and as a result changed the world. Licklider, by all accounts, was the visionary, the force behind it all. He was not only the oracle of the revolution, but he managed to put himself in a position in the government (at the newly created ARPA) where he could channel financing to projects of interest to him. And he wrote a number of legendary articles, where he foresaw the World Wide Web and personal computers. [23] He saw computers not just as adjunct to problem-solving, but — he took the term explicitly from biology — in a symbiotic relationship with man. His paper “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (from 1960) opens with what might be considered a metaphor — except that it isn’t one, it is an illustration of what the relationship between man and computer can become.

The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect Blastophaga grossorum. The larva of the insect lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it get its food. The tree and the insect are thus heavily interdependent: the tree cannot reproduce without the insect; the insect cannot eat without the tree; together, they constitute not only a viable but a productive and thriving partnership…

Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of man-machine systems. There are many man-machine systems. At present, however, there are no man-computer symbioses… The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today. [24]

Many of these early pioneers came from different fields. Licklider had come from psychology; Corbató from physics; Fano from electrical engineering. [25]

I contacted Dr. Corbató.

ERROL MORRIS: Tom Van Vleck urged me to talk to you about my brother and his contribution to e-mail.

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: I don’t remember the technical details of who did what and so forth. But Noel was right in the middle of things — working on the inner machinery of the system — and was one of the really crack system programmers. He knew how to make things work, how to put them together. And could write really well. It was a big project. And a very tough one, because we were breaking new ground in all directions. But the core of it was the young people who believed in the idea and made it work.

MIT MuseumProfessor Fernando Corbató, c. 1965

MIT Museum

ERROL MORRIS: What was the idea?

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: Back in the early ‘60s, computers were getting bigger. And were expensive. So people resorted to a scheme called batch processing. It was like taking your clothes to the laundromat. You’d take your job in, and leave it in the input bins. The staff people would prerecord it onto these magnetic tapes. The magnetic tapes would be run by the computer. And then, the output would be printed. This cycle would take at best, several hours, or at worst, 24 hours. And it was maddening, because when you’re working on a complicated program, you can make a trivial slip-up — you left out a comma or something — and the program would crash. It was maddening. People are not perfect. You would try very hard to be careful, but you didn’t always make it. You’d design a program. You’d program it. And then you’d have to debug it and get it to work right. A process that could take, literally, a week, weeks, months —

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. I remember my brother lugging around reams of paper, all of these computer print-outs. It seemed like a nightmare.

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: Yes. People began to advocate a different tactic, which came to be called time-sharing. Take advantage of the speed of the computer and have people at typewriter-like terminals. In principle, it seemed like a good idea. It certainly seemed feasible. But no manufacturer knew how to do it. And the vendors were not terribly interested, because it was like suggesting to an automobile manufacturer that they go into the airplane business. It just was a new game. A group of us began to create experimental versions of time-sharing, to see if it was feasible. I was lucky enough to be in a position to try to do this at MIT. And we basically created the “Compatible Time Sharing System,” nicknamed CTSS from the initials, that worked on the large mainframes that IBM was producing. First it was going to be just a demo. And then, it kept escalating. Time-sharing caught the attention of a few visionary people, like Licklider, then at BBN, who picked up the mantle. He went to Washington to become part of one of the funding agencies, namely ARPA. ARPA has changed names back and forth from DARPA to ARPA. But it’s always the same thing.

ERROL MORRIS: They’re close.

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: Yes, it is the same organization. They just keep periodically relabeling themselves. Sometimes “Defense” was the initial word and sometimes “Advanced Projects Research Agency.” Anyway, Licklider went down to DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] and proceeded to get in the position where he could go out and parcel out a lot of money, to try to encourage people to do good research. And, in particular, the one thing he was quite interested in was time-sharing and he came up to MIT and talked to a bunch of us. In those days, the MIT computation research was sprinkled in a lot of directions, a lot of different groups. And Bob Fano was one of the people that was involved in the discussions. He was a little bit like the elder statesman, even though he was just a few years older. But he took it upon himself to propose a new project, which came to be called Project MAC, which would collect together all these different groups who were interested in man-machine interaction.

ERROL MORRIS: What year was this?

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: I believe it was ’63. I don’t have the dates firmly locked in my mind. But we had done a demo with four typewriters in November of 1961 and we kept improving it. Fano proposed this project, which we all kind of coalesced on, and by the end of 1962, he had the proposal written.

ERROL MORRIS: And the goal was —

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: — to use CTSS as an initial platform and to explore the ramifications of man-machine interaction. It was also an opportunity to build a tool. [26]

Scientific American

ERROL MORRIS: From the beginning, did you have terminals hooked up to the mainframe? Was that something that happened early on?

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: It happened fairly rapidly. During that summer of anticipation, we beefed up CTSS by acquiring an IBM terminal controller, which was a big box called a 7750 that allowed us to have a large number of terminals. Modems were just coming into play. We were able to attach modems to the 7750, and modems to the terminals, and interconnect the modems via phone lines. MIT, at that point, had its own switched telephone network and we were allowed to put our modems onto the MIT telephone network. So to connect a terminal, it was just a matter of dialing up from the terminal’s modem and being assigned to the next available modem at the 7750.

ERROL MORRIS: I spent a summer with my brother in 1969. And his apartment had a terminal.

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: In ’69? Absolutely. We had a phone and a modem at each terminal. And we could dial up the computer. The speed wasn’t very high. The modems started out being 110 baud, which roughly is a dozen characters per second.

ERROL MORRIS: That’s incredibly slow —

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: They were slow and as big as a shoebox. And it was really pretty awkward. We were lumbering along. But just being able to do it at all was a big step forward. The technology was just changing from vacuum tubes, the 709, to the transistor machine, the 7090. Project MAC was going to be several hundred people, and so we needed the space to start a project of that magnitude. Fano managed to work out the plan to get space over in Technology Square, which became Project MAC’s first home. Initially we had just two floors. One of the service bureaus had decided they’d over-expanded and wanted to give up the space they had in the building. We were able to get one floor, and then another floor opened up, and so forth.

ERROL MORRIS: Did many patents came out of this?

Cambridge Historical Commission

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: We didn’t try to patent anything. The object was to influence the direction of the computer industry.

ERROL MORRIS: Which you did.

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: — which we did. That was our goal. And to form a nucleus of computer science at MIT. Until then, computer specialists had been sprinkled around in various groups and places.

ERROL MORRIS: And still no computer science department —

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: Most of the key leaders came out of the electrical engineering department. But electrical engineering at MIT was a peculiar department. It had a very, very broad view of what its charter was. It had everything, from biologists to material scientists — a rich tradition of being very spread out in its research directions. And so, most of the people that joined us, Project MAC, were part of electrical engineering, but not all. And Fano asked everyone to make their principal office in the same building where the computer was. This is turning into a longer story than I expected.

ERROL MORRIS: That’s fine.

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: And we wanted to come up with hardware that was designed to be time-sharing from the word go, rather than designed for batch processing. So we shopped around. And we talked to about half a dozen different vendors. IBM thought they were the prime possibility, because we were using an IBM machine for CTSS. But we discovered afterwards that they had been working on the 360 line of computers — a very ambitious project in its own right — to produce a family of machines, small to large, which were all batch processors. Unfortunately, a lot of the architecture was against the grain of what we were trying to do with time-sharing. [27]

ERROL MORRIS: So you didn’t go with IBM —

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: We formed a triumvirate. Bell Labs, MIT and the G.E. Computer Department agreed orally to work on this project. And each group had its own expectations of what they were going to get out of it. MIT was trying to influence the world. Bell Labs was trying to get a machine which was going to be a workhorse for their laboratories. And General Electric was hoping to get a brand new shiny product that they could sell to other customers. That was the genesis of Multics. We threw down the gauntlet and said, “This is what we’re going to do,” which was very unusual for software projects in those days.

ERROL MORRIS: Did you have any idea how difficult it would be to actually change how people used computers?

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: No. We didn’t realize how difficult it was going to be. Once you start from scratch, you really have to do everything. And even though we had anywhere from 50 to 100 people at one time working on the project, it was still a tremendous effort to try to get everything right. It was a visionary goal that everyone who joined the project came to believe in. It wasn’t just another job. And that’s how we kept people like your brother interested as a career. He was part of a group of people that knew how to make things happen. It was an exciting time, and everybody was inspired because they felt they were working on something worthwhile, not just another programming job. Not just another product.

MIT Museum

ERROL MORRIS: But e-mail? Was it a big thing? Or was it just —

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: E-mail just evolved. One of the first things you notice when you have everyone on the same machine is that it’s possible to share information back and forth. You can let others use your programs. You can send them data. You can send messages to one another. So early in the game with CTSS, we started up the ability to send messages to people that were logged in. I don’t remember exactly when we began to allow messages to be saved. But that was a natural consequence. And about the time that Multics was coming to life, the idea of networking also began to come to life.

ERROL MORRIS: Networking?! Did everything start at MIT?

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: No, it started with Larry Roberts, then at ARPA, who proposed — with Licklider’s encouragement — what came to be called the ARPANET. [28] He went around to all of the sites that Licklider was funding and talked up the idea, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could all send programs back and forth to each other, and to even operate computers from one side of the country to another?”

ERROL MORRIS: But didn’t you have to deal with different kinds of computers?

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: The ARPANET was complicated, because everybody in the country had different kinds of equipment. And so, part of creating the ARPANET was to come up with a plan to, homogeneously, allow people to talk to each other, even though they had different kinds of equipment. And Larry proposed a so-called interface message processor — an IMP — attached to what ever computer they were using. And the IMP smoothed out the fact that everybody had a different computer. [29] There were a lot of DEC computers, but there was a tremendous amount of variety. And that allowed the variety to be screened off, so people could communicate. Each of the sites that was interested got an IMP and programmed it to match the ARPANET, and then programmed the IMP to match whatever equipment they had. [30] At MIT we did that, too.

ERROL MORRIS: With so many innovations, what are you most proud of?

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: Oh, the fact that it was a team effort. We were able demonstrate that interactive computing was not only a viable idea but a powerful one.

ERROL MORRIS: But when you first started —

MIT Museum

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: It was very different. Batch programming software was not designed to be interactive. It was designed to dump out reams of paper, at best. It’s when you begin to get into the man-machine business, when we had first had time-sharing, that you designed different interfaces. You designed different ways to edit text. You designed different ways to write programs. It changed your strategy. All of that first began to show up on these mainframes that were being time-shared. And then, it migrated from the mainframes to the mini computers, which maybe had 10 or 15 people on them, and finally the personal computer, as the hardware kept allowing more new options.

ERROL MORRIS: Did you foresee any of this back in the early ‘60s?

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: In a dim way. Not quite so dramatically. We didn’t quite know which shoe would fall next. For example, we knew, from the earliest days, that a graphical interface would be advantageous. But the economics were such you couldn’t afford it. It would cost $50,000 to create a terminal for just one person. It just was not feasible.

ERROL MORRIS: But didn’t you experiment with graphical interfaces, as well? I remember seeing one.

Scientific American

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: Yes, we did have one attached to CTSS, which was called the Kluge, a very fancy graphical terminal. [31][32]

But it wasn’t until the personal computer showed up that people began to really see the potential. There is a side bar on that. One of the reasons that IBM jumped into personal computers was that Apple II was so successful. But the reason the Apple II was so successful was not because it was such a great machine. It was because there was one program on it which suddenly made it of immense value to companies, namely VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet. It was a runaway success. Apple doesn’t like to admit it, but that was the main reason why people were buying Apple IIs. And that’s what got IBM’s attention — suddenly the business world was finding something valuable that they weren’t building.

ERROL MORRIS: History is odd. It’s almost impossible to guess what will be saved and what will fall by the wayside. I’m indebted to Tom Van Vleck and glad that he has become an historian. Without him, I would never know about my brother’s work. I told him he should publish a book. And he said, “What would I want to do that for?” [laughter] He said, “If I put it online, I can constantly update it and correct it and improve it. If I write a book, it’s just a book.”

ERROL MORRIS: I keep thinking of the crowd at my brother’s funeral. How did they all know? Do you remember how you found out?

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: I don’t remember, but I remember it was a shock. The Multics group, by and large, was young. And death was not a common phenomenon. Very few people have died that worked on the project. That will change with time, of course.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Time catches up with all of us, eventually.

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: But this project inspired people. They felt they were working on something that would last. It was a chance to make a mark on the industry and to change the way things happened.

ERROL MORRIS: To change the world.

FERNANDO CORBATÓ: Yes. We were the forerunners of the way things went.

*******

I then learned that Robert Fano, Corbató’s roommate and officemate, was still alive. And delighted to talk about the past.

[25] Oral history with Robert Fano from the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota: “It was around 1960. Let me see if I can remember the exact date. There was a great deal of concern on the part of the administration about computer facilities at MIT. So they appointed a committee to make a recommendation consisting of Al Hill, Phil Morse, and myself. Various records also show Jerry Wiesner [Pres. Kennedy’s science adviser and, eventually, president of MIT] was a member. But I do not recall — he probably left for Washington. But he did not really play a part. We promptly appointed a technical committee, which consisted of the various computer types at MIT: Corby, and John McCarthy, and Minsky, and Doug Ross, and Jack Dennis were there. Herb Teager was chairman. Now by that time the idea of timesharing was already moving, and they proposed the development at MIT of a timesharing system.”

[26] In an interview years earlier, Corbató said, “So that was mostly to convince the skeptics that it was not an impossible task, and also, to get people to get a feel for interactive computing. It was amazing to me, and it is still amazing, that people could not imagine what the psychological difference would be to have an interactive terminal. You can talk about it on a blackboard until you are blue in the face, and people would say, ‘Oh, yes, but why do you need that?’ You know, we used to try to think of all these analogies, like describing it in terms of the difference between mailing a letter to your mother and getting [her] on the telephone. To this day I can still remember people only realizing when they saw a real demo, say, ‘Hey, it talks back. Wow! You just type that and you got an answer.’”

[27] Fernando Corbató, “IBM was trying to humor us. They viewed it as kind of an interesting experiment. Unbeknownst to us in this whole time frame, they were hard at work developing what came to be known as the 360 line of machines and they had it close to their vests. The people that had sold the management of IBM on the 360 had convinced them that it was a machine to solve all problems from here to forever after. That wasn’t true. Clearly, timesharing was not on their agenda and they viewed it as an aberration. They saw the goal as to have a line of machines which allowed them to sell much like the auto manufacturers. You would have a starter machine and then a larger machine and then a larger machine. They saw it only as a way to sell machines to customers. They did not think of it in terms of the way people would use computers.”

[28] In his ARPA Program Plan of 1968, Lawrence Roberts wrote, “Just as time-shared computer systems have permitted groups of hundreds of individual users to share hardware and software resources with one another, networks connecting dozens of such systems will permit resource sharing between thousands of users.”

There are odd scraps and bits of information in the MIT Archives. Room 14N-118. Boxes filled with papers, memos, diagrams, drawings. 25 records cartons, 3 oversized records cartons, 2 manuscript boxes. Collection number: 282; accession numbers: 89-80, 89-101, 93-60, 94-1, 94-33, 94-37, 94-43, 94-44, 94-46, 94-47, 95-25, 95-28. I found references to my brother, and to his friends and officemates. I remember them from the ‘60s – Tom Van Vleck, Tom Skinner, Mike Padlipski. Of course, I know my brother worked for Project MAC, but it is still fascinating to find a record of it. Internal memos expressing the need for more programmers. It is the cutting-edge of computer science research before there was computer science. Quaint title pages, hand-lettered on construction paper. Someone had taken the care to draw a guide for block-lettering with a ruler, so the titles would appear square on the page. But there are misspellings. Misspellings that would be quickly corrected by a modern-day computer. It is how things looked before there were computers. And endless mimeographs. [17] Letter-head appear in the late ‘60s, as if someone became convinced that something important was happening, and it should have an official imprimatur.

Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT

Looking at the boxes I felt trapped in lost geological time. Trilobites and crinoids shading into bony fishes. There is the retrospective knowledge that all of it is going to vanish. The IBM Selectric typewriter was introduced in 1961 and would eventually capture 75 percent of the electric typewriter market. Eventually, typewriters would become extinct. Xerox introduced the first plain-paper desktop copier in 1963. Dot-matrix printers eventually appear in the early ‘70s. Everything was changing. At Project MAC they were working to make computers interact with people, but they were changing the very nature of how we write, send, print and copy messages. And beyond that, how we interact with each other.

A document in the files simply states,

The idea behind machine-aided cognition was that a system could and should be devised to enable a human and a computer to work together in a real-time collaboration focused on solving a problem. Such intimate collaboration would, in a practical sense, require a computing system that could be used simultaneously by many humans and would be physically and intellectually convenient to use …

And then the mimeographed memos disappear. [18] Like trilobites at the end of the Paleozoic Era. There’s a prophetic note in one of the boxes.

The memos seem to have been superseded by e-mail.

*******

We often forget that collecting and saving documents is a haphazard affair. What is saved? And what is lost? Jerry Saltzer, one of the leaders of Multics and a longtime professor at MIT, saved everything. And it is partly due to his efforts that there are records of what happened at Project MAC in the ‘60s.

ERROL MORRIS: There is a note at the end of one of the memos saying, “the memos have been superseded by e-mail.” It’s not flagged in any way, but it marks the end of something old and the beginning of something new. Everything changes. You can see the changes not just in the content of what is written, but in how it is written and reproduced. Technology is replacing itself.

I asked Ben Berman, a Harvard student who works in my office and is a computer whiz, to get on the phone with me and Van Vleck. I was afraid that there were too many arcane details, and I wanted to understand more fully what Tom and my brother had been working on. If you could dig into the CTSS code itself, could you determine who wrote what, when?

BEN BERMAN: I’ve been looking over the complete Multics source code that is dated as late as 1973. This is the batch that’s brought up on the Web site. And I’m finding a lot of comments and how people would sign off in the code. How did you indicate that the piece of code was written by you and how did Noel? How did members of the team do that? Read more…

…the computer is here, and no doubt it is going to develop.
Everybody, or almost everybody, seems a little uneasy about
this, and why not? This is man’s first encounter outside himself
with something that is exactly like some inside part of himself.

— E. E. Morison, from “Computers and the World of the Future” (based on a conference in 1961 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of MIT)

It was a short comment on my recent essay in The Times, “The Ashtray.”

#82: Tom Van Vleck
Ocean City, NJ
March 11th, 2011
9:44pm

…I had email today from another middle school student asking about Noel Morris’s place in history as (a) creator of electronic mail.

Noel Morris’s place in history? Noel Morris was my older brother, who had dropped out of MIT and spent most of his waking hours holed up in an apartment working at a computer terminal. This was in the ‘60s, long before there was anything close to a home computer. The name Tom Van Vleck was not unfamiliar. He was a friend of my brother’s who worked with him at MIT in those days.